Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and masculinity in a projectified society

This research project explores social and political implications of dreams that take the shape of projects in Cairo. As in most parts of the world, projects have become the default route to envision and actualise brighter futures in Egypt. Men from most social classes devise small-scale business projects for profit making and social improvement. The military-backed regime undertakes spectacular mega projects to showcase its grandeur and national-development ambitions.

The research analyses project dreams as a pivot of contemporary economy and society. How do projects shape, and limit, visions of personal and national futures? What activities and subjectivities does ‘projectification’ encourage, preclude and heroize?

The project is based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo, who contrive, finance, and launch small business projects. It also examines a few futuristic mega projects through media material and press archives. Studying Egyptian projects as projects provides an empirical entry point for analysing what I call ‘project dreamwork’: a combination of imaginative dreams and hard labour, conditioned by material and legal circumstances, culturally specific notions of value and gender, and the project’s distinct organisational form.

The study will shed light on the predicaments and promises of an increasingly projectified economy and society and on a particular masculinity – the Projector – who personifies President el-Sisi’s Egypt.